First post, by jfarms
I'm so confused as to what's going on. I have an ASROCK b75m-itx and two optiplexes- a 7010 and a 9010 SFF. I've successfully installed XP SP3 via USB in both optiplexes multiple times. I try to do the same thing in the ASROCK and when it goes to boot from the USB the screen just stays black with a blinking underscore. The BIOS in the ASROCK is the newest available.
I've read all kinds of blog posts suggesting all kinds of different things, and none of the answers/suggestions have gotten me any closer to my goal. (Somehow my w7 installation for this dual boot wound up getting corrupted as well in my repeated attempts to boot from USB- I had to take out the drive and wipe it in AOMEI before being able to reinstall W7).
Literally the only thing I haven't tried yet is installing via CD because all my sata CD drives are damaged, so I'll need to use the one in the Optiplex.
(I did initially get the ASROCK successfully with dual-boot w7 & XP system because I had installed the dual boot in an optiplex and just plopped it into the ASROCK. One of the reasons I wiped it to re-install is everytime I booted into XP, I would get 3 or 4 'install drivers for new device' pop-ups for an 'unknown' device. I never had those pop-ups in the optiplex, and I installed all the drivers from ASROCK support- had never installed drivers before on that OS when it was in the optiplex).
Thanks for any ideas. Hoping fellow retro enthusiasts can share some ideas since other forums prefer to tell me to use w10 🤣.